


Grocery Girl

by murg



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst and Humor, Awkward Flirting, Comedy, F/M, Female Character of Color, Gender Role Reversal, Grocery Shopping, Grocery Store, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Small Towns, Unreliable Narrator, everyone is painfully awkward in this, why are those tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:48:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28246437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murg/pseuds/murg
Summary: “I, uh. See you around here a lot,” she says.“It’s the grocery store,” I point out. “I come here every week.”
Relationships: Original Female Character & Original Male Character, Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 3
Kudos: 43





	Grocery Girl

Jocelyn _loves_ errand days. She loves them so much that she straps herself into the back seat five minutes before we’re supposed to go.

“You’re late, Seb,” she always says with an offended jut of her lower lip as I crawl into the driver’s seat.

“Uh huh,” I mumble, slotting my key into the ignition.

“I want to get...cabbage at the grocery store,” she announces.

“Alright. Why?”

She shrugs. Her mind runs on a totally different wave length than mine. A higher frequency, no doubt.

“You want to eat cabbage?” I ask, putting the car into reverse.

“Huh?”

“If you want to get cabbage,” I say patiently, “then you want to eat it?”

“Oh. I dunno. I’ve never touched one.”

“Well, how about you touch one when we get there? That sound cool?”

“Yeah.” She plucks at her seatbelt, humming. “Do you have the shopping list, Seb?”

“Yup.”

“Okay.” She nods to herself.

“I saw you added Poptarts. I’m not getting Poptarts.”

“Seb!”

I ignore her whine as I pull onto the street.

\- - -

One seven-minute drive later and we’re at the holiest of holies. The grocery store. It’s a singular monolith, ugly on the outside, serving five towns in the area. It’s the only one.

And it doesn’t have any bananas, this week.

Alright. I cross that off the list, then. There’s the successful cross-off and the defeatist cross-off. This is the defeatist cross-off, indicated by the sharper line indenting the thin notepad paper.

Jocelyn hangs off of the front of the shopping cart. I told her not to do that when she first moved in, but it was a losing battle. I used to do it when I was a kid, anyways. I probably would still do it, if I weighed less and had someone else to handle the grocery shopping for me.

“You want to see a cabbage?” I ask her. “Don’t actually grab it. But you can touch one.”

She nods sharply, eyes intense. “Yeah. Where’s cabbage?”

“It’s next to the broccoli. It has a sign.” I indicate at the produce. “Um. I’m gonna grab potatoes and stuff. I’ll be right here.”

“Okay!” She leaps off the cart, the metal rattling under my tense wrist.

I concern myself with the arduous task of finding edible potatoes. It’s daunting. It’s always daunting. This is the only grocery store for twenty miles in any direction, so no, we don’t have any white potatoes and no, we don’t have any red potatoes, and yes, we do have soft-skinned russet abominations.

I grab them with a grimace, setting them in the cart. I’ll take them, but I’m not happy about it. I have some standards, at least in regards to potatoes, but standards don’t put food on the table. _Idaho fresh!_ the bag says. _More like_ ** _Idaho shit!_** I think.

I’m not a very clever person.

Jocelyn leans over the cart, petting the bag of potatoes as I stare at the grocery list with bleary eyes. “Seb, there’s _different types_ of cabbage.”

“Mmhm.” I start to wheel the cart toward the meat section. They’ve got a multitude of cabbages, but only one potato in stock. That’s how it is, this week. “Like what?”

“There’s one that’s just called ‘cabbage.’ There’s ‘red cabbage’! But it looks purple, not red. Why do they call it red if it’s actually purple? That’s like purple finches. They look red, but we call them purple, right? That’s so weird. Why do we do that?”

“Maybe everyone’s colorblind but you,” I mumble, leaning over the poultry. A chill bites against my bare arms.

“And there’s Nappa--Nah-pa? Naw-pa?--cabbage, too. That’s all the cabbages I saw.”

“Very cool.” I drop some chicken thighs into the cart. They’re cheaper than white meat. I scratch them off the list.

No cheese on the list, so next is milk. I trudge forward, Jocelyn swaying on the end of the cart as she takes stock of our paltry findings. Potatoes and chicken. No bananas.

Milk, though. That’s there. They never run out of milk. Coffee creamer, sure. All the time. But never good old two-percent.

“Hi.”

I whip my head to the side at the close sound, coming face-to-nose with another person.

The person waves. It’s a woman.

I discreetly glance behind me, finding no one close. I look back at her. She waves again, making distressingly intentional eye contact. “...Hi?” I venture.

She smiles. Dark eyes, curly hair, cherrywood skin. Weirdly-patterned yellow sweater. I have no clue who this person is. Should I? I wrack my brain, but I really have no idea. One of us is committing a faux pas, but I’m genuinely not sure which. Strangers generally aren’t supposed to interact with one another. It’s an unwritten social code.

“I, uh. See you around here a lot,” she says.

“It’s the grocery store,” I point out. “I come here every week.”

“Right.” Her eyes dart to my hand on the fridge door handle. Her shoulders square. “I just recognized you, that’s all.”

“Okay.” I open the door and glance at the dates on the gallons of milk. I’m hardly distinctive-looking. I lean in, propping the space open with my right shoulder.

“Let me get that for you.” The door disappears from my side. I look up, finding the handle in the woman’s hand.

“Oh. I don’t need--”

“Say thank you!” Jocelyn chirps.

“Ah. Thank you,” I say dumbly.

The woman laughs, her black curls bouncing around her smooth jaw. “Man, I forgot how kids can be. I don’t have any. She yours?”

“Is she-- Um.” I shuffle, pulling out a gallon. “Yeah. ...She’s my niece.”

She hums absently, shoulders loose. I don’t think she caught my very vague implication. “Oh, okay.”

The fridge door snaps shut. I place the milk in the cart. Jocelyn hangs off the end with an open mouth, staring absently at the ceiling, thinking about whatever the hell seven-year-olds think about. Probably arcane philosophy.

“You got a girlfriend?”

“Huh?” I blink. “Um. No.”

“Seb,” Jocelyn groans, still staring at the ceiling. Her eyes are glazed with boredom.

“I gotta go,” I say. My fingers creak over the gross plastic handle of the shopping cart.

“Sure.” The woman nods rigidly. Her smile falls halfway. “Anyways. It was nice to talk.”

“Yeah.” Was it?

“See you around,” she says, “grocery boy.”

“Uh huh.” I offer what I hope approximates to a friendly smile and wheel Jocelyn into the cereal aisle.

Well. That was uncomfortable. Glad it’s over.

And grocery boy? Really? I mean. She didn’t know my name, and I don’t know hers. I guess the moniker is somewhat appropriate. I _really_ don’t remember ever seeing that woman.

“She didn’t have a cart,” Jocelyn notes.

I do a double-take, but she’s gone. “Oh. I didn’t notice.”

“She didn’t.”

“Well, she probably just ran in to grab a few things and leave.”

“Can we do self-checkout?”

I turn my eyes back to Jocelyn, who’s dismounted from the cart in favor of idly trailing her fingers over various jars of peanut butter. “Huh? Uh. If you want. But you gotta make sure you scan everything with me. We’re not done, yet, though.”

She nods. “How does the machine know how much stuff weighs? Like when you set vegetables on it and it just _knows.”_

“It has a scale in it.” I nudge the cart against her sneaker. “You wanna grab your cereal?”

“Yeah!” She rushes to the other side of the aisle, wrestling with a box. I think it’s oat-based? I don’t really remember. It tastes unhealthy, but we both like it, so we eat it.

I’m not a father. I’m trying, but I’m not a dad.

I think I’m allowed to eat cereal.

God knows I’m not allowed to keep Poptarts in the house if I want to make sure Jocelyn survives to middle school.

So yeah. I’ll allow cereal. I’m still a man, after all. I have needs.

\- - -

Jocelyn and I watch cartoons when we finish errand day. Errand day is Sunday, so she has all her homework done. That’s a house rule I put in place pretty quickly when we started living together. _Homework done on Saturday or you don’t get to go out on Sunday._

With the threat of missing errand day over her head, Jocelyn always has her homework done before bedtime on Saturdays. She really is a good kid. Not mouthy at all. The child psychologist told me that’ll probably come with time, once the reality of her situation sinks in or she starts to grow up more, whichever comes first.

I can’t really blame Future Jocelyn, but I’m not exactly thrilled about the prospect.

Nor am I thrilled about my sister. Don’t get me wrong; I love Jocelyn and I care for my sister deeply. But this has been really hard. I’m in my early twenties; I feel like a kid myself, stumbling through all of this with 20/200 vision.

Doesn’t really feel fair.

I’ve always been cleaning up Melissa’s messes for as long as I can remember. I guess this is no different. I’m just glad the father didn’t get custody. That would’ve been really bad. Melissa may have called this _temporary_ but so was her third relapse and, at this point in my life, I have no expectations for anybody about anything.

“Seb, it’s seven.”

“Oh. Right.” I reach for the remote. “You want to watch your show?”

It’s some PBS kid trivia show. I don’t remember the name.

“Yeah.” Jocelyn is smart. Her temperament is good and seems promising. She likes trivia and stuff like that. Studious. Maybe she’ll get on an adult trivia show like _Jeopardy!_ someday, when she’s an astro-surgeon or whatever vaunted profession they have in the future.

Me? I’m dumb as bricks.

I settle against the couch after changing the channel. Jocelyn bounces, a broken spring prodding against my butt cheek with a sharp insistence. My eyes slide shut, head pulsing.

I’m _tired._

\- - -

“Oh, hey!”

I look up from the schoolyard fence, body jerking in shock. “Um. Hi.”

A woman is waving to me, smiling. I squint, brain clicking slowly.

“What’re you doing here? You don’t have work?” she asks, sounding way too familial for someone I don’t know.

...Except I do know.

It’s the chick from the grocery store. Now that I’m not consumed by grocery ire, I can actually look at her. She’s wearing a summer dress even though it’s early October, ending mid-way down her bare thighs. Her hair’s tied into a bun at the top of her head, a few loose curls dangling over her forehead as she flashes me her white teeth from between furled, full lips.

Oh no. She’s hot.

I hadn’t noticed that when I was in Grocery Mode, but yeah. She’s pretty hot, actually. One of the hottest women I’ve ever seen in person.

And she’s talking to me. Asking me about my job.

Shit.

“I’m between jobs,” I answer, cringing internally at my honesty. I should have said something better like ‘lawyer-doctor.’ Or maybe I made the right call and she’ll somehow respect my honesty. (That’s the most laughable thing I’ve considered in a long time.)

“Ah.” She cocks her head, some sympathetic lines beginning to draw themselves across her face.

Oh, I hate that.

My lizard brain helpfully supplies that, while I’m between jobs, I’m still technically working, so my idiot mouth delivers, “Um. I’m mowing lawns, right now.”

Her face drains of expression. I have no idea how to read the look in her eyes now. Well, this is embarrassing. I’m embarrassing myself in front of a hot woman.

There’s no coming back from that. Ugh. As if my life couldn’t become any more of a garbage pile. I’m going to go home and cry in the shower, later. Right now, though, I’d prefer not to do that. Cry, I mean. There’s nowhere to shower, here.

So deflect. Deflect. Christ, just _deflect._ “What’re _you_ doing here? I thought you said you didn’t have kids.”

“I don’t.” She looks sheepish. “I was just in the neighborhood and I saw you. So I thought I’d stop and say hi.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“Yeah. Hi.”

The wind hisses through the tree branches.

She smiles at me, teeth very white.

This hot woman is weird.

I once heard a rule that all hot women are weird. I don’t know. Maybe it’s true. I don’t exactly interact with the fairer sex on a regular basis. Men and women seem to live very separate lives when they aren’t looking for love. I mean. I don’t exactly interact with _anyone_ who isn’t Jocelyn or Jocelyn’s pediatrician care unit. So.

“What’re you doing tonight?” she asks.

“Eating bad potatoes and looking for work,” I say.

She nods as though this is an interesting discussion, as though I said something of critical importance to her own nighttime plans.

“The grocery store never has the potatoes I want,” leaves my mouth, unbidden. I have absolutely no idea why I said that.

“Yeah, it seems like it doesn’t have a lot in stock,” she says. “It really surprised me. I’m having a hard time adjusting.”

“You’re not from here?” Look at her; she’s obviously not from here. She’s hot and she’s black and she has all of her teeth.

“No, I moved upstate recently. I just got a job working for the county.”

“Oh. Cool.” It’s not cool, but I’m not exactly replete with adjectives. I watch the kindergarteners trail out of the school entrance. Elementary kids will be next.

“Yeah. I’m a lawyer,” she says.

Shit.

I don’t want to clam up, but it’s hard not to after I hear that.

“Don’t like lawyers?” She sounds teasing, but who can really tell?

“Uh. No. I don’t have an opinion on lawyers,” I say weakly.

She shifts beside me, but I don’t look toward her, my eyes trained on the doors.

“That’s really impressive,” I offer. “Being a lawyer, I mean. That’s cool.” Cool. Shit, I don’t know many words, do I?

She just hums.

Elementary kids are streaming out of the entrance.

“I gotta go soon,” I say. “My niece is done with school.”

“Where do you live?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. You live close to the school?”

“Yeah.” I shift, glancing through the fence. The buses are lined up. “Just down the street, about a quarter of a mile. I walk her to school and I walk her home. It’s pretty convenient.”  
“Sounds convenient,” she agrees. “What house color are you? They’re all different colors, right?”

“I rent half of a house, the gray one? 17 Cherry Road.”

“Oh, okay. I’ve seen that.”

“Yeah.” Jocelyn breaks away from the crowd, making eye contact with me. I nod, standing away from the fence. She’ll make her way around the gate and meet up in a minute.

The woman takes my attention, now. Hot lawyer woman. This is a social scenario straight from my most deranged lonely nightmares. All she has to do is open her mouth and say, _You have no money and you probably have a small dick_ and then it’ll feel almost nostalgic.

She looks the picture of politeness, though. “You care about her a lot, huh?”

I frown. “What?”

“Your niece. You seem very dedicated.”

I shrug, eyes trailing along the sidewalk. “She’s my responsibility. I mean. I’m taking care of her, I’m her guardian, so.”

“Oh, wow.” She glances between me and the fence. “So you’re raising her alone?” It’s an invasive question, but her tone is warm and easy. Not pitying, not prying. Not even curious. It sounds like she’s asking for confirmation.

“Yeah. Um, she’s a good kid, though. Great grades, always brushes her teeth. You know.”

“I don’t have a kid,” she says. Which, I know. She told me that when we encountered one another in the wasteland known as the grocery store. “Always wanted one, though.”

I didn’t. Or I’m not sure. Not like this. That’s not really a conversation I want to have, least of all with a stranger.

“What’s her name?”

I eye her, frowning. “Why? I don’t think I’m supposed to share that kind of information. Uh, safety and stuff.”

She looks terribly amused. I’m not sure why.

“Seb!” Jocelyn calls, sneakers slapping against the uneven sidewalk as she pants. “I got an English test on Friday. You’ll help, right?”

I break away from the woman. When had we moved so close to each other? I hadn’t really stepped away from the fence, so that’s weird. Whatever. “What kind of test?”

She huffs. “Grammar. Help me review flashcards.”

“Yeah, I can do that.”

“I guess I should let you go.” It’s the woman.

I look up. “Sure.” What else am I supposed to say? I feel like I’m supposed to say something. _Nice talk?_ Something? So I say, “Nice talk.”

“Maybe you could mow my lawn sometime,” she says with a smile.

“Uh. I could,” I reply dumbly.

“Seb,” Jocelyn snaps, grabbing at my wrist. “Can we go now?”

“Just a second.”

“Anise,” the woman says.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s my name.”

“Oh. Um. Hi, Anise.”

“And you’re Seb,” she says.

I stand still, despite Jocelyn’s insistent tugging.

“She said your name,” the woman, Anise, points out.

“Right.” I deflate, following after Jocelyn. Right. She did. “Um. Goodbye, An--Anise? Anise.”

“Yeah. Bye, Seb.”

“That was the woman from the grocery store,” Jocelyn announces to the whole town while we walk away.

I’m too tired to cringe properly, but I do feel mortified in a muted sense.

“Right, Seb? That was that woman.”

“Yeah,” I say softly, tugging on her hand. “Come on.”

\- - -

Of course I’m still thinking about her--Anise--even after my shower-cry that turned out to be more of a shower-sniffle than anything. I’ve never been much of a crier, no matter how frequently I feel like crying internally. Something something male tear ducts or hormones or whatever. I don’t know. It’s not really here or there.

I stare at my ceiling, humming just to feel the vibration in my throat. It’s a thin, weedy sound that dissipates in the stagnate air of the small room.

I’m just really tired. This old lady tried to pay me twenty bucks for over three hours of push-mowing her field of a lawn. Maybe that was a boon in the 60s or whenever she was in her prime, I don’t know. It doesn’t work like that in this millennium. Or I wish it didn’t.

I wish I were still a teenager, listening to Jimmy Eat World in my parents’ decade-old car with the manual window cranks. I was always alone as a kid, never really had any friends or family that wanted to bother with me. Melissa took up a lot of people’s attention and resources; she’d been troubled since the day she was born. As the baby, I was sort of thrown to the wayside in favor of trying to save her. I’m not mad about it. I’ve always understood.

But I wish I could have grown up with a little more human connection. And, lying in my bed, I consider what the grocery store woman (Anise) would have looked like as a teenager. I wonder if she’d have sat with me in my parents’ car, listening to CDs and talking about music and feelings and local sports teams.

This is a level of desperation that has crossed the threshold into pathetic. I’m not sure I’m willing to take the next step and entertain it.

I’m lonely but I’m not _that_ lonely.

I groan pressing my face into my shitty pillow. Zero lumbar support. I hate it so much. Cheap things only offer cheap comforts, though. I don’t have a bank account that allows me to prioritize issues like back pain. 

I’ve got a kid, after all.

Ha ha.

I think I know how the Virgin Mary must have felt at times.

\- - -

The rest of the week is a blur. All weeks exist seamlessly like the flow of a river, occasionally interrupted by the presence of a doctor’s appointment or an after-school function like a boulder or tree trunk jutting out of the water.

And, of course, there’s the weekend. Saturday and errand day. Jocelyn doesn’t have an alarm, but she always wakes up around nine-thirty. Consistent sleep schedules and all that.

“None of the other kids in my class have a bedtime,” she grouses, dipping her spoon absently in her cereal.

“I doubt that,” I reply, scrolling through wanted ads on the computer. _Laundry Staff Wanted, 7+ years experience in housekeeping necessary._

“They told me!”

“They probably just want to seem cool.” I look up at her somber face. Kids are so overdramatic. Or maybe they’re appropriately dramatic. I’d rather her be anguished over bedtimes than anything else. “I had a bedtime when I was in second grade.”

She rolls her eyes.

“Hey.” She can’t do that. “Use your words. You think I said something stupid?”

She shrugs, sulking over her bowl.

“Jocelyn.”

“You’re not my dad,” she mumbles into the meat of her palm, eyes darting to the side.

“Yeah, I’m your uncle,” I agree with an even tone. “And you’re living with me for a bit, so we gotta follow rules. I don’t like making rules, Jocelyn, but that’s just how it is. If you don’t have any rules, that’s called anarchy.”

“Anarchy.”

“Yeah.” I turn my attention back to the computer. “Anarchy means that there are no rules.”

“I want anarchy,” she says.

“No, you don’t. If we had anarchy, there’d be a lot of bad stuff.”

“Mom didn’t give me a bedtime.”

My jaw spasms into a clench. Death throes. Rigor mortis. I can feel a headache coming on. “I’m not your mom,” I say. “And like I said, you’re staying with me right now. So we gotta follow the house rules. If we don’t have rules, we don’t have to brush our teeth or stuff like that. And then all our teeth’ll fall out and we won’t be able to eat anything but baby food. You want that?”

“No,” she mumbles, scowling at the table.

“Jocelyn, we’ve got rules, okay?”

“Your rules are _dumb,”_ she spits.

“Okay. That’s it.” I close the laptop. “You’re not going grocery shopping with me, tomorrow.”

Her eyes bug out of her head, lips parted.

“You can’t talk to people like that, okay? So you’re not going out tomorrow.”

“Seb!”

I feel bad but I also feel pissed off. But I also feel bad. I’m not parent material. Neither is my sister, though, and that didn’t stop her from procreating and making a whole-ass other person.

“You’re grounding me!” she cries.

“I’m not _grounding_ you.” I rub my face. “I’m just not taking you grocery shopping, tomorrow. You can’t act like that, so I’ve got to show you the consequences. You can go next week.”

 _That’s grounding,_ my brain points out.

“This is _idiot-ass stuff,”_ she seethes, shoving her soggy cereal away from her. “You’re _not_ my dad!”

“That’s right, I’m your uncle. Do you see me talking to you the way you’re talking to me, Jocelyn?” I flounder for a moment, trying to grasp a simplistic explanation of what I’m trying to get across. “You’re raising your voice and, um. And saying bad words and stuff. That’s disrespectful.”

She grimaces, staring at me with offended eyes. Something must have set her off; Jocelyn really isn’t a mouthy kid. She’s a good kid. This is about more than bedtimes. It’s got to be.

She can’t articulate it to me, though, and I can’t read her mind.

“You do bad stuff too,” she points out.

“Yeah, we all slip up,” I say. “And we face the consequences for slipping up.”

“You say bad words too.”

What?

“Bad words?” I repeat, scouring my brain. I know I’m not exactly ‘parental,’ but I don’t think I’ve done or said anything that wasn’t kid-friendly around Jocelyn. “What bad words have I said?”

She eyes me dubiously.

“You can tell me what word. You’ve got a bad word free pass.”

“Stupid,” she blurts.

Oh. Huh. Well, I guess. I guess ‘stupid’ is a bad word, huh? “Yeah,” I say slowly, trying to consider this from a seven-year-old’s perspective. “I’m very sorry about that, Jocelyn. I won’t do that again.”

“Well, I won’t complain about bedtimes again. So there. I’m going grocery shopping tomorrow.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well you say bad words and _you_ do whatever you want,” she snaps. “That’s not fair!”

I can feel that stress headache coming on. “Jocelyn, I’m not a kid, so I can do certain things. But I won’t do them again. I’m apologizing to you, okay? I’m sincerely sorry that I swore. I promise I won’t do it again.”

She puffs her cheeks, letting out a loud, blustery sigh. “What did Grandma and Grandpa do if you swore as a kid? Did they make it so _you_ couldn’t go grocery shopping?”

What did--? Nothing. They never did anything. I never experienced punishment or praise, growing up. I was just sort of there.

I can’t say that to Jocelyn, though. I think about what other kids’ parents did if they swore, but I didn’t know many kids, growing up. I didn’t know many people. I think about what movie parents did, an embarrassed sense of panic crawling up my arms. I don’t have much life experience.

“My mom would make me put a bar of soap in my mouth,” I settle on, hoping it doesn’t sound too lame or unbelievable.

Jocelyn scrunches her nose. “Why would she do that?”

“To clean out my mouth?” I offer dumbly. “Because they’re, uh. Dirty words.”

She considers this, looking at me evenly. Clearly her brain is trying to work out some punishment equivalence math. Does a grocery shopping ban equal soap in the mouth?

I can see where this is going. She’ll definitely think whatever punishment she’s getting is worse than whatever fictitious punishment I ever got. “How about this? We both face our consequences. You don’t go grocery shopping with me and I clean out my mouth.”

“Huh?”

“We’re both getting punished for breaking the rules, Jocelyn.” It sounds crazy coming from my mouth. I’m an adult, with years of (alleged) social context behind me. Every word coming from my mouth is absolutely _wild._ “You won’t go grocery shopping tomorrow and I’ll have to put a bar of soap in my mouth.”

“You’re gonna put soap in your mouth,” she reiterates.

“Um. ...Yeah.”

“Do I got to put soap in my mouth?”

I blink. “Huh? Why?”

Her lips are a flat line.

“--Oh. Right.” She said a bad word, too. “No. I, um. I don’t want you to put soap in your mouth. That’s not part of our rules. That’s from my...from your grandparents’ rules.” There’s no way I’m sticking soap in a kid’s mouth. That sounds...really mean, I think.

“Okay.” She slips off of her chair, padding out of the kitchenette.

“Jocelyn,” I call, “where’re you going? You haven’t finished breakfast.”

“I’m coming back,” she says, voice faint. “I’m getting your soap.”

Great.

 _I’m a first-order idiot,_ I think distantly.

She returns to the table in short order, just as she promised, holding out the bathroom’s bar of soap with a solemn expression. I take it, the surface waxy under the pads of my fingers. It smells like...well, soap.

I stick it in my mouth.

\- - -

“Your niece isn’t with you?”

I look up from the broccoli. “Huh?”

The hot grocery woman--Anise--shoots me a smile. She has straight teeth. Lawyer or whatever. Right.

“Uh. Hi. No, she’s...she’s at home.

“Oh.” Anise looks me over. I’m not sure why she does that. She doesn’t try to hide the movement of her roving eyes, either. I feel a bit self-conscious at that, tugging idly at the cuffs of my hoodie. “Well, I could keep you company, if you’d like.”

Company? Who asks for company in a grocery store? I’m not like-- I don’t require any special assistance or anything. I’m a little short, yeah, but I can reach the top shelves and stuff. I don’t need a chaperone.

“I can reach the top shelf,” I say because I’m fucking insane, I guess.

She arches an eyebrow. “I don’t doubt your capabilities.”

Well, that makes one of us. “I gotta grab potatoes,” I mumble, defeated, tossing a head of broccoli into the top of the cart.

Anise follows me to the potatoes, where--of course--there are no white potatoes. Again. I groan.

“Bummer,” she says, sounding a bit amused. Well, lady this is not an amusing situation. Try living here for over twenty years; it stops being funny really fucking fast.

“I hate this grocery store,” I say, every emotion I’ve ever had bubbling under my skin.

Anise doesn’y seem put off, but she also doesn’t laugh.

I’m grateful she doesn’t laugh.

“So what’re you doing for dinner?” she asks, instead of walking away like a normal person.

“I dunno, probably curry or something,” I answer, skipping past the potatoes. I already have terrible russets at home. There’s no justice in this world. “Like. Just the block things.”

“The roux,” she says.

I don’t know what a “roo” is. Kanga and Roo, from Pooh Bear? God, I’m so stupid.

“You don’t seem super psyched about it.”

I shrug. “It’s food. I’m not a chef or whatever.”

“Want to go out, instead?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Nah, I can’t. ...But the diner on main street has good egg salad sandwiches,” I tell her, fiddling with some bananas. We have bananas in the store today, which is admittedly pretty exciting. Too bad they’re all brown.

“You want to grab one some other time?” she asks.

“No, but I recommend them, definitely.”

“Do you want to go to dinner with me, sometime?” she asks.

I pick up a bunch. They’re soft. I set them back down. I’m not really focused on what she’s saying; more than half of my brain is busy assessing the ripeness-to-rotten ratio of these crappy bananas. “Oh, probably not. I’m, um. I’m busy, most nights and afternoons. But I know some local people who could show you around, if you want.”

“Busy with your niece, you mean.”

My eyes trail along the skid-marked floor, a familiar stone of weariness threatening to lodge itself at the bottom of my throat. “Yeah.”

“So you can’t really go out.”

I shrug. “Not really anywhere _to_ go.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“I know it’s true.”

She laughs softly. “So it’s just you and your niece, tonight?”

“Yeah.” I push the cart toward the meat section. It’s always just Jocelyn and me. I guess it could be worse. It could be just me.

“Why don’t you guys come over to my place?”

I pause, looking at her. She’s looking back at me. The ceiling lights cast a weirdly sterile glow on her, like a spotlight. Not a theater spotlight. Like one of those spotlights dentists use when they’re destroying your mouth. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Just ignore me.

It’s...easier if people just ignore me.

“For dinner,” she says.

“Are you. Um, sorry.” I blink, squinting for a moment. “Are you...asking me to come to your house? For dinner?” Maybe I misunderstood what she’s saying; maybe I’m looking into it too much. I mean, probably. I would do that. That’s a thing I would definitely do. I think.

But she says, “Yeah.”

And I’m at a loss. I’ve never been invited to anyone’s house, ever. Not in school, not as an adult. I didn’t even get invited to any of my cousins’ weddings.

More importantly, I hardly know this woman. Strangers don’t just invite you into their homes. It doesn’t work like that. Not in upstate New York, anyways. Not in most parts of the world, I’d imagine.

“Isn’t that weird?” I blurt because my experience with social interaction is limited and my charisma is in the negative. “I mean. Sorry. I mean. Um.”

Anise laughs. “I guess, yeah. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

“I hardly know you,” I tell her.

“We could get to know each other better.” She offers a smile. It’s polite and well-practiced. She has such a nice smile, nice face, nice clothes and a nice job. She probably has a nice house. “What kind of food does your niece like?”

“I really shouldn’t take my niece to a stranger’s house.”

She offers an acquiescent nod. “Well, if she doesn’t want to come, that’s fine.”

“No, I shouldn’t-- Stability is just. Really important.” I shut my mouth before I share private details. I would do something dumb like that.

Anise isn’t dumb like me, though. Cogs turn behind her eyes. “Huh.”

“I can ask her,” I offer weakly.

“Sure, definitely,” she says. “Her comfort comes first. And if you don’t want to, that’s fine, too. I won’t be offended.”

“...I’ll ask her.”

“How about this?” She pulls her purse to her front, pulling out a scrap of paper and a pen. “I’ll write down my address. Stop by at six, if you want. I’m making a big thing of pasta for the week, so it’s no trouble if you guys show up or not.”

“Okay,” I say, taking the paper from her. This is a surreal situation.

“Either way,” Anise says, pulling away. She smiles again. I just stare back dumbly because I'm dumb. “Guess I’ll see you here, next week.”

\- - -

“Are you gonna knock?” Jocelyn asks me, bumping into my arm as she sways.

I swallow, throat very dry. I’m not sure if this is a terrible idea. Anise seems nice enough, but it’s a weird invitation and I’ve had so many recommendations on Jocelyn’s upbringing that I try to follow to the letter that I’m terrified of deviating from whatever schedule we have. My life, whether I like it or not, is an extension of hers.

And I’m not upset about that. It’s just...it’s tiring.

“What’s her name again?”

“Anise,” I tell her, staring at doorknob like I have an obligation to watch it.

“Anise. Anise. Anise.”

“We don’t have to do this. If you’re uncomfortable at all, Jocelyn, you need to let me know, okay?”

Jocelyn’s face pales, stricken. “I already did my grounding!”

I blink. “I mean. Yeah. You-- It wasn’t grounding. But yeah.” It was totally grounding. “You’re not in trouble, Jocelyn.”

“Please, can we eat at her house? Please, please, _please,_ Seb! She looks like a movie star!”

She kinda does. “She’s not a movie star.”

Jocelyn rolls her eyes. “I _know,_ I know she’s not really a movie star!”

I sigh, raising my knuckles to the door.

It swings open after one instance of contact, revealing Anise and her perfect smile. “Great to see you!” she says.

“Uh. Yeah. Thanks for inviting us,” I reply, sand in my throat. It occurs to me, now, that I don’t actually remember that last time I went into someone else’s home. Past the front door, I mean. I’ve been to people’s front doors plenty of times. Even stood in their entryways.

But Jocelyn and I step past Anise’s threshold and then we’re _in_ her house. Because we’re going to eat dinner here.

I guess I expected a mansion inside, with chandeliers or something. But it looks like a normal house. It’s a nice house, certainly. But normal. Modestly-sized.

It’s often cheaper to buy a house than to rent an apartment, out in the country. Rural America’s weird like that.

“Do you want us to take our shoes off?” I ask, lightly grabbing at Jocelyn’s arm before she can track dirt into the house.

“Sure, you can set them by the door,” she replies, glancing behind her. “The kitchen’s to the left.”

“Okay.”

I watch Jocelyn toe off her off-white sneakers and set them in a neat line perpendicular to the door before I follow suit.

“My name’s Anise,” Anise says to Jocelyn when we enter the tiled expanse of her full kitchen. It’s nice. New microwave and stove and fridge. That stainless steel sort of deal. “What’s yours?”

“Jocelyn,” she replies, sliding onto a kitchen chair.

“That’s a pretty name.”

“Thanks.”

Anise moves to the stove, taking the lid off of a pot. It’s spaghetti sauce. I can smell it, so, I don’t need to see it to know. Thanks, nose. “Missed you at the grocery store, today.”

“He grounded me,” Jocelyn says sourly.

“Oh?” Anise intones. “What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Jocelyn’s un-grounded,” I say, watching her stir the pot. “We’re all good now, right, Jocelyn?”

“I guess.”

“Well, I’m square with you. You can be square with me if you want.”

“I don’t know what that means,” she groans, leaning over the table.

“It means you’re even,” Anise says. “Even-Steven.”

Her cheeks puff out. She doesn’t say anything, letting the air escape in the form of a beleaguered sigh.

“Being a kid is hard,” Anise says, sounding sympathetic.

Yeah. Being a kid is hard, I think. So’s being an adult. Being human, it’s kind of a drag.

“You like spaghetti, Jocelyn?”

“Yeah,” she answers, sitting up in her chair. “We eat spaghetti, like, every week. But Seb just gets the spaghetti sauce from a jar. Grandma makes it herself.”

Anise laughs while I want to sink under the table.

“Is yours from the jar?”

“Jocelyn,” I warn.

“It’s fine.” Anise waves the wooden spoon. “No, I made mine from scratch. Just like your grandma.”

“Cool. It tastes way better.”

I want to evaporate.

“Hopefully,” Anise says. “You’ll have to let me know.”

I take my place at the table and will my chest not to implode. I don’t know why I’m so freaked out. I do suck at cooking. No one ever taught me. Maybe it’s the whole situation. Actually, it’s definitely that. Introducing Jocelyn to Anise, sitting in Anise’s house, eating food Anise made, trying not to look like the total ass I will inevitably reveal myself to be. That kind of stuff.

Yeah. If I can eat pasta without committing six social crimes, I’ll consider this night a success.

\- - -

“Seb,” Jocelyn nudges at me.

“What?”

“It’s seven.”

“Oh. _Oh._ Um.” I look up. “Sorry, but can she watch your TV? There’s this show she, uh. She likes watching.”

“It’s a trivia show,” she supplies.

“Sure.” Anise stands up. “Tell me the channel and I’ll turn it on for you.”

“Cool!”

“Jocelyn.”

She looks at me blankly for a moment. “Right! Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” Anise replies, leaving the room. I watch Jocelyn hop out of her chair and follow after. My eyes turn back to the kitchen. A big bowl of spaghetti sits in the center of the table, framed by our three plates and water cups. The rest of the sauce still sits on the stove, half full and cooling. There’s a colander in the sink, next to an empty pot. I don’t own a colander. I put a plate over the pot when I try to dump out the water and pray I don’t get spaghetti stuck in the drain.

I should probably clean up, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I guess I’ll do that. It’s weird, cleaning up in a stranger’s kitchen, but it’s less weird than not cleaning up. By my calculations, at least. Shit, I’ve never been good at math. I failed pre-calc twice.

It’s fine. No one noticed. I’m not even sure the teacher did.

There’s a strange comfort in dishes, anyways. Maybe it’s just the warm water. Or not having to face other people. I don’t know.

But fuck. Colanders are apparently hard to clean.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that.”

I look up, Anise is right next to me. Hi there. “It’s fine. I just figured. Um. I felt weird, just sitting there, I mean. So.”

She shrugs, moving toward the stove. “I’ll clean them later, but thank you so much. Let me get you guys some stuff to take home.”

“You really don’t have to do that.”

“No, but I want to.” She reaches up into her cabinet, pulling down some containers. “You can just give them back to me sometime.”

“At the grocery store?” I think about lugging them around in a backpack to the store. Seems unnecessarily awkward.

She laughs, shaking her head. “Or you could just stop by. You know where I live, now.”

“Oh.” I feel stupid. “Right.”

Jocelyn whoops in the other room. She’s really good at trivia. I wish I were good at things.

“Why’d you come up here, anyways?” I ask.

“I got a job,” she says, spooning sauce.

“Sure. I just mean. --Sorry, don’t answer if you don’t want to. But why _here,_ you know?”

She shrugs. “It’s fine. I guess it’s a valid question. Good pay, surprisingly, and--well. I wanted to get away. Family situation wasn’t ideal. I’m from New Jersey, originally.”

“You don’t have a Jersey accent.”

Anise shoots me a look. “Most people in New Jersey don’t have that accent.”

Oh. In retrospect, it’s a dumb thing to point out. I’ve only ever seen Italian-Americans on TV and movies talk like that.Man, I’m... I’m just really stupid. “Well, uh. Hope you have a...better time up here?” Stupid. Stupid. So, so _stupid._ Wow.

“Yeah, I hope so, too. I’ve been here for two months and at first, I felt like I was going to go out of my mind. There’s nothing to do and nobody to talk to.”

“Oh. Well. ...Yeah.”

“You too?” she asks, capping the container and sliding it across the counter to me. “Thought you lived here.”

“Um. I do, but. Same. I don’t really have any friends or anybody.”

“Weird. You seem like a nice guy,” she says.

“I try,” I reply, fiddling with the silicon lid of her fancy glass tupperware. “Not sure if I’m succeeding.”

“Well, I like you.”

I blink, turning to look at her. In the dim yellow glow of the overhead light, she flashes me her bright smile.

I’d never heard a girl say _I like you_ to me before this.

I mean. I’d thought about it. Lots of times. _That’d be nice,_ I used to think, _to have some form of attention._ Some proof that I was desirable on a fundamental level. It didn’t actually even have to be a girl. Just another human, I’d have taken that. A human being saying, _I like you, Seb._

 _I like you._ Sitting in my parents’ car, listening to music, clouds rolling with the promise of heavy rain later in the evening. A bittersweet nostalgia for a memory of a fantasy.

“I don’t...” My voice cracks, a desperate edge that I can’t erase. “I don’t understand.”

She frowns. “Don’t understand what?”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” I say weakly.

“Oh.” She cocks her head, as if she’s really considering it. Maybe she is. She glances toward the kitchen table, gathering her words. She has more words than I do. A full arsenal. Lawyer-level words that can decimate my weak platitudes of “cool” and “okay.”

“I was flirting with you in the grocery store. You realize that, right?”

Flirting? She just talked to me. Does that count for flirting? Maybe any time a woman talks to a man, it’s flirting. That doesn’t seem right to me, though.

I shake my head.

“I think you’re cute.”

“I’m not cute.”

“I just said I think you are,” she replies, arching an eyebrow. “Am I not allowed to have an opinion?”

“Of course, but--”

“Then there you have it.”

“Every man in my family has gone bald,” I tell her.

“...Okay.”

“I just mean. I’m probably gonna be bald and fat and uglier in a few years.”

“You’re really trying to kill a mood,” she murmurs.

“What mood?”

Anise laughs softly. Her breath puffs against my nose. When did she get so close? “You know, you’ve got that ingénue thing going for you, but this is a bit ridiculous.”

I don’t know what “ingénue” means.

“No one’s ever said they liked me,” I confess.

She pulls away, lips tugging into a curved frown. “Nobody?” she asks, voice hushed with an awful sort of shock.

Humiliation creeps up my neck. I’m such a loser. “Nobody ever.”

“Oh. Um. ...Wow.”

“Not even my parents,” I say before my mind can decide if that’s a good idea to share. It’s not, obviously. It’s a really pathetic thing to admit. “I, uh. I’m used to. Being alone.”

She looks so uncomfortable, now. _Super_ uncomfortable. Whatever mood I was apparently trying to kill has been effectively slaughtered.

“Sorry, I don’t know how to interact with people.”

“It’s okay,” she says quickly. “--Well. It’s not okay. But that’s not on you. That’s not your fault. You know that, right?”

I shrug. “I never thought about it in terms of, um, you know, fault or whatever. That’s just how it is.”

“I like you, Seb,” she says, sounding so serious.

It’s almost funny how serious she sounds.

Almost.

I mean, it’s serious, so it’s definitely not funny. But it’s still laughable.

Because I have no idea how to respond to this. I’ve thought of it so many times, but I’ve never considered it in enough detail to realize that I’d have to respond. Because I do. I have to respond to that. And I don’t know how.

In my mind, in my imagination, in my dreams, it’s always some nebulous _somebody_ and I was just...I don’t know, I guess I was just a voyeur to it. A voyeur to my own fantasy. But I’m here, physically, and I have no clue what to do. I never planned to be part of this interaction.

“Do you know how much more difficult it is to get a date with you, compared to literally every other guy?” she asks. It sounds like a rhetorical question, but I’m not sure.

So I ask, “Is that rhetorical?”

“I guess it’s rhetorical when the answer is obvious,” she replies.

“I guess.” I pause, frowning. “Um. Is this-- Like, is this a date?”

“It’s a date,” she says. “...Well. If you want it to be a date, anyways.”

I don’t know. I really don’t know if I want this to be a date or not.

She reaches out, fingers grasping my palm in a loose grip. Like a weird handshake.

Oh. We’re holding hands, aren’t we?

(I’m _really_ stupid. Wow.)

Her hand is soft, warm, knuckles rising like peaks underneath my questing thumb. I must have held a woman’s hand before this--my mother or my sister or...someone, when I was a kid, crossing the street--but I can’t recall the sensation. This feels totally new.

I realize that I’ve just been weirdly feeling up Anise’s hand for about thirty seconds. “Sorry.” I pull away.

Anise reaches out and grabs my hand again, tugging it between us. “About what?”

“I was being weird about your hand.”

She laughs. Not at me. Or. Well, maybe. But not in a mean way. “I think you seem really sweet,” she says, smiling at me. Right at me. “I know I’m a bit-- Well, I’m weird, too. I scoped out a guy in a grocery store for weeks because I thought he looked cute. But maybe you’d want to meet up like this again, sometime?”

“...Weeks?”

She waves her other hand, grimacing. “A topic for another day.”

“Oh. Okay.” I shift, my teeth claiming my lower lip in the arduous task of thought. Because this is a bad idea and my heads knows it but my gut doesn’t.

“I’m basically a single father,” I say. “I just. Want that to be clear.”

“Seb, I know.”

In the yellow light of her kitchen, the television murmuring in my left ear and my pulse thundering in my right, I don’t think Anise looks like a movie star at all. She’s too close, the slightly crooked orientation in her right incisor apparent. She looks like a very beautiful woman, instead. Someone real. Someone nervous.

“I... I’d like to try,” I confess. “I’d like to. I’d like to get to know you and stuff.”

“You sound like something’s stopping you.”

I open my mouth, but find no real rebuttal. Because she’s right; she does know about Jocelyn. And Jocelyn seems to like Anise well enough, so far. And Anise seems to like me, for whatever insane reason. But still, I feel like there’s this huge barrier between me and other people, like some law of nature that prevents me from participating normal social relationships.

“Seb, it’s over--”

My neck pops with the speed I turn toward the hallway. Jocelyn is staring at us. “Um. Hi, Jocelyn. It’s, uh. Your show’s over? We should go, then, right? It’s almost time for bed, so, um. Uh.”

“Are you two dating?” she asks, frowning.

“No,” Anise says, stepping away from me. She lets go of my hand. My skin feels cold and clammy.

Jocelyn narrows her eyes. “I’m not stu... I’m pretty smart.”

“Definitely, Jocelyn,” I agree.

“So don’t lie to me. Seb promised he’d never lie to me.”

“We’re not dating,” I tell her quickly. “We are not, currently, dating. No.”

She nods, apparently satisfied with my frenzied sincerity. “The show’s over. And I gotta be in bed by eight. Or Seb will _ground_ me again.”

“Oh, yikes. I’d better get you guys out of here, then,” Anise says, twisting to the side. She presses the large container of sauce into my hands. “Here you guys go. Better than the jar stuff, right?”

“Way better,” Jocelyn agrees.

I clear my throat. “Come on.” I walk Jocelyn to the entryway and hand her the tupperware after she gets her shoes on. “This was very nice. Thank you, Anise.”

“No problem. I’m happy to have the company.”

I nod, eyes glued to the floor under her socked feet as I open the front door and walk out after Jocelyn.

“Wait! Here’s my number.” Anise patters across the entryway, holding up a slip of paper. “Call me if you need anything.”

“Um. Thanks.” I take it, slipping it into my front pants pocket.

She steps forward, pressing a kiss to my check. “See you later,” she says, smiling with her not-quite-perfect teeth. “Hopefully before your next shopping trip.”

“Yeah,” I reply dumbly, turning to stagger off the steps. “Bye, Anise. It, um. It was really great to see you.”

Jocelyn pets the silicon lid over the sauce in her lap, watching me fail to put the key in the ignition four times. “It’s okay to have girlfriends,” she says.

I blink, body freezing.

“Because you’re old enough. Like, you’re allowed to have girlfriends and stuff. You’re _ancient._ ”

“I’m not really that old,” I mutter.

“You’re over sixteen,” she points out. “So you’re old. And you can have a girlfriend. Just like how you can swear, sometimes.”

My eyes slide away from her, toward the light leaking from Anise’s doorway. She’s still standing there, watching us. “Thanks for the permission, Jocelyn.”

“You’re welcome,” she sniffs, leaning her head against the back of her seat.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” The key turns in the ignition, unsteady engine crackling beneath us.

“She seems really nice.”

“Yeah. She does.”

“She likes you. So that means she’s got to be nice.”

I throw the car into reverse, sparing her a questioning glance.

“Nice people like other nice people,” Jocelyn explains sagely.

“Oh. You think I’m nice?”

“Not today. You were a _jerk_ today. But usually, hm, yeah. I think you’re nice, Seb.”

I snort, pulling the car into drive. Jocelyn leans past me to wave. I see Anise waving back. So I wave, too. Waving is such an awkward act, isn’t it? Like, why do we do this thing with our arms? I feel stupid.

“You just seemed happy, talking to her,” Jocelyn says. “You don’t usually seem happy.”

I stare at the shadows cast by the headlights on the dirt road, smile slipping off my face. I hadn’t even realized I’d been smiling. “Oh,” I whisper.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I was pretty happy.”

“That’s good. It’s good to be happy.”

“Yeah. It is.”

“We should see her again, then.”

I look in the rear-view mirror. Anise is still in her doorway, a silhouette surrounded by yellow moonlight. The thin skin resting above my cheekbone tingles. “Yeah,” I say, throat feeling strange. Like I’m going to cry. Like I’m going to actually cry, regardless of shower, hormones be damned.

“Somewhere besides the grocery store. Her house is super nice. Her TV is bigger than ours.”

Instead of a sob, a wet laugh leaves my lips. “Yeah, Jocelyn. I’d rather hang out with her outside of the grocery store, too.”

But considering how it's turning out, I guess the grocery store isn’t such a bad place to meet up, either.


End file.
